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Stuffed Mushrooms Baked
Chop the stalks and parings of the mushrooms very fine. For six mushrooms saute about one cupful of the chopped material in two tablespoonfuls of butter with a tablespoonful of chopped olives. Add two tablespoonfuls of flour and cook until frothy; then add one cupful of stock, a little milk, a teaspoonful of chopped parsley, with salt and pepper. Stir and cook until quite thick. Put the cap of each mushroom gill side up on a round of stale bread and fill with the mixture; sprinkle with buttered cracker crumbs and bake in a moderate oven about fifteen minutes.
A straightforward stuffed-mushroom canapé that uses the trimmings as the filling. The only real difficulty is that the quantities assume large field mushrooms, not the small cultivated buttons sold today.
- Mushroom sizeSix mushrooms supplying about a cupful of chopped stalks and parings suggests large caps, of the kind sold as field or portobello mushrooms rather than small cultivated buttons. If you use buttons, chop in extra whole mushrooms to make up the cup.
- "Parings"Older cooks peeled the caps of field mushrooms, which have tougher skins than cultivated ones. Modern mushrooms need no peeling; just use the stalks, plus the dark gills scraped from the portobellos if you want more filling.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as around 350F. Fifteen minutes is enough to heat the filling through and crisp the crumbs; large caps may want twenty and will release liquid, so bake on a rack or blot the caps first.
- The sauce is the hingeFlour cooked in butter "until frothy" is a roux — keep it a minute or two before the stock goes in, or the filling tastes pasty. Cook it until it is thick enough to mound on a spoon, since the mushrooms will give off water in the oven and thin it.
- Stock and milkA cup of stock plus "a little milk" is roughly a cup and a quarter of liquid to two tablespoons of flour, a loose sauce that has to be cooked down, as the recipe directs. The kind of stock is not specified; a good chicken or mushroom stock does the job.
- Buttered cracker crumbsPlain crackers crushed fine and tossed with melted butter; about a tablespoon of butter to a quarter cup of crumbs works. Panko tossed the same way is a workable substitute, though coarser.
- The bread roundStale bread cut into rounds to sit the caps on. Cutting them a little wider than the cap and toasting them lightly first helps them take up the juices without going to mush.
- YieldSix pieces — one substantial canapé each for six, or a first course for three.
The placement of this among the sandwiches may be a clue to how the word was used at the time: a "sandwich" then seems to have covered almost anything served on a cut round or finger of bread, open-faced included, which is why canapés and savoury toasts turn up alongside sliced ham between buttered slices. Cultivated mushrooms are generally said to have been something of a luxury in American kitchens at the turn of the century — commercial growing in caves and cellars is usually described as expanding but uneven in supply, and cookbooks of the period are often said to treat mushrooms as a garnish or a flavouring to be stretched, which would explain the frugality here of building the stuffing out of the stalks and peelings rather than throwing them away. The chopped olives point the same direction as the era's other fashionable savouries: a salty, sharp note in a butter-and-flour sauce, the same instinct that produced olive sandwiches and devilled spreads.